The amazing adventures of Doug Hughes

Posts tagged ‘career crisis’

Hi, I’m Doug Hughes. This is a reboot of my personal blog at DougHughes.net. I used to have another blog here a few years ago where I wrote about personal and technical topics. This was back in a time when I was still getting my company, Alagad, off the ground and a lot of business and personal content was mingled together.

A while back I moved most of the content from DougHughes.net onto the Alagad blog and simply pointed DougHughes.net to Alagad.com. That was fine and dandy, but it is now time for me to reclaim my own personal space on the internet.

The reason I’m doing this is because I’m going through a bit of a mid-career crisis. I haven’t really talked about this publicly before and, honestly, I’m not quite sure why I’m going to start now. Perhaps it’s so I can talk through the challenges I’m having. Maybe I can get useful feedback from those people who read this. Maybe it’s a narcissistic ego thing. I don’t really know.

The problem I’m having is this: I don’t really enjoy the work I’m doing (contract web programming) as much as I used to. There, I’ve said it out loud! The world knows! That at least that’s off my back!

There was a time when Alagad and programming was all I could think of, but these days I’m really longing to do something else. A while back I hired my father in law as a program manager for Alagad. Over time he took over many of the tasks I didn’t want to do such as collections. This continued until we decided he should formally be the CEO of Alagad. So at this point my role in Alagad is as a technical leader and programmer. This has enabled me to luxury of thinking about doing something other than just Alagad.

In fact, in late in 2011 I quietly handed my resume around to a few companies but I didn’t really find anything I liked (that also liked me). My idea was that I would take an extended leave of absence from Alagad, get a developer-level job with a startup company that I found interesting and use that as an opportunity to meet new people and learn new things. It didn’t really pan out.

For those who are familiar with Alagad, please know that Alagad itself isn’t going anywhere, even if I do. It’s being operated by capable hands and works is done, as always, by Alagad’s excellent employees and contractors. If I step away from the company nothing will change.

Also, over the last few years I’ve brainstormed business and product ideas on an almost daily basis. For a while I was trying to tweet one new business idea a day at DougsIdeas, but that petered out after a while. I didn’t really get much feedback or interest in what I was trying to do. However, I think some of my ideas are actually pretty good! I even started work on a few of them, but I haven’t yet had any success taking them to any meaningful completion.

To complicate matters, I’ve learned that I have Depression and Attention Deficit Disorder. I’m trying to treat these, but they sure can make it harder to do what you want to. This has been very hard to admit to myself – or to anyone else, really. I feel like I should be able to pick myself up do something, but it’s not really that easy.

What this all boils down to is this:

There are lots of things I want to do with myself. By this I mean there are lots of businesses I would like to start or jobs I’m interested in. I’m a curious person. However, I don’t have a ton of time or money to invest in these businesses. And depression and ADD often stymie me.

So, on this new blog I’m going to start trying to think verbosely about some of these challenges, things that I want to do. I’m going to try to strategize ways to do these things. I’ll also talk about other more personal things as well like family, friends, etc. I’m going try to lay it all out for the world to see. I hope to get some good feedback and support. We’ll see where it goes.